A quirky and provocative look at teen life in a company housing project, Miki Aihara's Hot Gimmick is the latest manga series to receive the VizBig treatment (among the other big-selling series to have gotten reprinted in this larger format: Dragon Ball, Fushigi Yûgi, and Rurouni Kenshin). Collecting three books of the original 12-volume series into one fat 5-½"-x-8-1/2" trade paperback, VizBig's collection contains enough juicy plot twists, personal betrayals and romantic complications to get you hooked on the series' seriously screwed-up lives. Though marketed as one of Viz's Shojo Beat titles, this "older teen" rated series is by no means a flowery young girl's romance — not unless your idea of innocent romantic comedy revolves around domestic violence, date rape drugs and possible teenaged pregnancy.
The central heroine of Gimmick is a slender 16-year-old named Hatsumi Narita, who lives with her family in the Tobishi Trading Company housing complex in Tokyo. Because all of the building's families are tied into the company, there's a rigid social hierarchy established, with the wife of company vice-president Tachibana lording it over the families on the floors below them. The book's opening establishes this quite neatly in a scene where a friend of Hatsumi's named Subaru is seen rummaging through the garbage for a thrown-away Gundam model. When the building's queen bee observes this, she takes it as an opportunity to put down Hatsumi, who she thinks was also going through the trash. "I must insist that you refrain from doing anything that compromises the dignity of this complex," Miz T. states, establishing the rigidly judgmental milieu that spurs what's to come.
Things grow complicated for Hatsumi after her younger sister Akane asks her to pick up a pregnancy test. The buxom 14-year-old has missed her period and doesn't know who the possible father might be; Hatsumi, who hasn't even had her first kiss yet, is appalled by her sibling Lolita's behavior but goes out to buy the "Yes or No" test, anyway. Unfortunately, she's seen with it by Ryoki Tachibana, the bookish son of the building's matriarch and Hatsumi's onetime childhood tormentor. In exchange for his keeping quiet, Ryoki blackmails our heroine into becoming his "slave." "There's something about her that makes me want to pick on her," Ryoki later explains to Subaru.
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